Welcome to issue 111 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Announcements

CHP package. Neil Brown
announced
the release of version 1.2.0 of the CHP library (which
supports explicit message-passing concurrency in Haskell), with various
bug-fixes and a new "clock" synchronisation primitive.

smartword 0.0.0.5 Web based flash card for Word Smart I and II
vocabularies. Ki Yung Ahn
announced
the release of smartword
0.0.0.5, a web based flash card system for Word Smart I and II,
a popular book series for studying GRE vocabularies.

HackMail 0.0 -- Procmail + Monads = Awesome!. Joe Fredette
announced
his very second Hackage upload, HackMail.
Hackmail is a Procmail-alike, though it doesn't (yet) support procmail
syntax. It dynamically loads a haskell source file and then sits as a
daemon watching a directory for new emails. The source file contains a
function which sorts email and delivers it to some directory.

io-capture-0.2 capturing std(out|err) in IO action. Yusaku
Hashimoto
announced
the release of io-capture
0.2, a library to capture stdout and stderr in an IO action. It exports
a function capture, which takes an IO action and a String representing
the entire input, and returns Strings representing the data written to
stdout and stderr.

Making videos of your project. Don Stewart
described
how to create short screencasts showing off your latest awesome Haskell
project.

WinGhci, a GUI for GHCI on Windows. Pepe Gallardo
announced
the first release of WinGhci, a simple GUI for
GHCI on Windows. It is closely based on WinHugs, and provides similar
functionality.

hranker: Basic utility for ranking a list of items (e.g. for the logo
poll). Robin Green
announcedhranker,
a command-line utility that helps the user rank a list of items (of
any type implementing Show, Eq and Ord). The hope is that the code is
sufficiently clear that it could also serve as an educational piece of
code, especially for people wanting to learn how to use the HCL library.

salvia-0.1, salvia-extras-0.1. Sebastiaan Visser
announced
a new version of Salvia,
a lightweight Haskell Web Server Framework. Changes in this release include
easier dependencies, some new default handler environments that simplify
setting up a server application, support for keep-alive, a great deal of
additional documentation, support for Windows, and various cleanup and
bug fixes.

Haddock 2.4.2. David Waern
announced
a new release of Haddock,
the Haskell documentation tool. This is a bug fix release only, and it's
the same version that will ship with GHC 6.10.2, unless any important
problems are discovered before the GHC release. Because the .haddock file
format has changed, links to previously installed documentation will not
work when generating documentation using this version.

ansi-terminal, ansi-wl-pprint - ANSI terminal support for
Haskell. Max Bolingbroke
announced
the ansi-terminal
and ansi-wl-pprint
packages, which allow Haskell programs to produce much richer console
output by allowing colorisation, emboldening and so on. Both Unix-like
(OS X, Linux) and Windows operating systems are supported (via a pure
Haskell ANSI emulation layer for Windows).

I/O library for Windows. Felix Martini
announced
the package,
an I/O library for Windows using Windows API functions with I/O completion
port support. The main goal of this library is to support Simon Marlow's
new Handle API once he has added that to GHC. The library also has a
compatibility module for socket functions from the network-bytestring
package.

Discussion

Grouping - Map / Reduce. Günther Schmidt
asked
about a way to lazily group an unordered list of key/value pairs, leading
to some interesting solutions and discussion of preserving laziness.

about Haskell code written to be "too smart". Manlio Perillo
began an epic
discussion about Haskell coding style, idioms, pedagogy, and much,
much more.

Quotes of the Week

ddarius: fmap: Because getting
functions to the values is half the battle.

monochrom: Monad is about postmodernism. There are laws
but no one owns them. You can interpret them any way you want. You
can write about your own understanding and the meaning of your
writing is not fixed.

conal: Recursion is the
goto of functional programming

monochrom: "Monad
is about computation." "Our company is about synergy." "iPod is about
coolness." Godawful postmodernism nothingness.

olsner:
nah, SkyNet is just a zygohistomorphic prepromorphism, nothing fancy

vixey: put some restriction like every token has a
neighbourhood locally homeomophic to algol